Engage at Every Stage: Using Mobile Relationship Marketing (MRM) to Put More Interaction in the Hand

There are few, if any, experts in the world that would claim mobile engagement is not the wave of the
future. The statistics and data around mobile undeniably point to this channel of connected devices
and on-the-go communications as rapidly evolving into one of the most influential and potentially
game-changing technologies facing today’s marketer. Yet despite the excitement, attention, and
investment that mobile is generating, marketers are still in the early stages of truly exploiting mobile
to the fullest degree. To be sure, there are some impressive early adopters and trailblazers, but what
is clear from this study is that a shift in thinking around the entire scope of mobile engagement is not
just a suggestion, but a mandate.
Consider these key points:
• By the end of 2011, there were 6 billion mobile subscribers, which equals 87 percent
of the world’s population (International Telecommunications Union).
• Mobile broadband subscriptions outnumber fixed broadband by 2:1 (ITU).
• There are almost 1.2 billion mobile web users globally (ITU).
• Ten percent of website hits/views came from a handheld or mobile device (Stat Counter).
• In 2011, 7.8 trillion SMS messages were sent. Experts anticipate that number will rise to
9.8 trillion in 2012 (Portio Research).
• Also in 2011, 669.5 million people used mobile email (Portio Research).
• Mobile IM will exceed 1.4 billion users by 2016 (Juniper Research).
• Sixty-four percent of mobile phone time is spent using apps (Nielsen 2012).
• App-to-person (A2P) messaging will over take person-to-person messaging (SMS)
by 2016 (Juniper Research).
• Sixty-one percent of smartphone users and 49 percent of mobile and tablet users
make local searches from a device (comScore).
• Mobile payments are expected to quadruple to $630 billion by 2014 (Juniper Research).
• In the U.S., 64 million smartphone owners accessed social networking or blog destinations
via mobile devices as of December 2011, up 77 percent from December 2010 levels
(comScore).